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Ground-Based Signals Measured From Space Could Enable Quantum Encryption Network – Photonics.com

Photonics.com Jul 2017 ERLANGEN, Germany, July 5, 2017 Quantum-limited coherent measurements of optical signals were sent from a satellite in Earths orbit to an optical ground station over a distance of 38,600 kilometers (almost 24,000 miles). Excess noise was bound. The precise Earth-based measurement of optical signals from a satellite demonstrates the potential for a satellite-based quantum encryption network using equipment that is already in space.

Although methods for quantum encryption have been in development for more than a decade, the technology has been unable to work over long distances because residual light losses in the optical fibers used for telecommunications networks on the ground degrade the quantum signals. According to researchers, encryption techniques such as quantum key distribution will be of increasing importance as current encryption codes based on mathematical algorithms become easier to crack.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light worked with satellite telecommunications company Tesat-Spacecom GmbH and the German Space Administration to conduct the experiments.

From our measurements, we could deduce that the light traveling down to Earth is very well suited to be operated as a quantum key distribution network, Max Planck researcher Christoph Marquardt said. We were surprised because the system was not built for this.

A satellite-based quantum encryption network would provide an extremely secure way to encrypt data sent over long distances.

We were quite surprised by how well the quantum states survived traveling through the atmospheric turbulence to a ground station, said Marquardt. The paper demonstrates that technology on satellites, already space-proof against severe environmental tests, can be used to achieve quantum-limited measurements, thus making a satellite quantum communication network possible. This greatly cuts down on development time, meaning it could be possible to have such a system as soon as five years from now.

Developing such a system in just five years is an extremely fast timeline since most satellites require around ten years of development.

The researchers are now working with Tesat-Spacecom and others in the space industry to design an upgraded system based on the hardware already used in space. This will require upgrading the laser communication design, incorporating a quantum-based random number generator to create the random keys, and integrating post processing of the keys.

The results of initial experiments indicate that quantum communication using satellites in space is feasible and could open the possibility of a global quantum key distribution network for secure communication.

There is serious interest from the space industry and other organizations to implement our scientific findings, said Marquardt. We, as fundamental scientists, are now working with engineers to create the best system and ensure no detail is overlooked.

The research was published in Optica, a publication of OSA, The Optical Society of America (doi:10.1364/OPTICA.4.000611).

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Top 5 cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb suffers major data breach – Digital Trends

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Why it matters to you

As if you needed yet another reminder -- if someone calls you up and asks for your password or other private information, don't give it to them.

Its easy to get a bit discouraged lately when it comes to securing our personal data. There are so many different methods being used by cyber criminals to get access to our data that it is tempting to just give up on the notion of keeping our information to ourselves. Cybercriminals use a variety of electronic means to break into systems, whether it is our own PCs or those maintained by the hundreds of companies with which we do business. Sometimes, it is the combination that does the trick a breach in an individuals PC serves as a gateway to organizational data and results in our information making its way into the wild. Such seems to be the case in an attack on the Bithumb cryptocurrency exchange.

The news comes via Hot for Security, based on information from some local reports in Seoul, Korea where the attack occurred. Apparently, a Bithumb employees PC was compromised and customer information including mobile phone and email addresses were stolen. The breach occurred on June 29 and around 30,000 customers were affected.

While Bithumb asserts that no information was accessed that would provide direct access to customers digital currency wallets, the stolen information seems to have been used in voice phishing scams targeting individual customers. A number of victims have come forward claiming the loss of significant amounts of money, including one customer who succumbed to a phishing attempt and lost 10 million won (approximately $8,700) in bitcoin.

Bithumb is a significant player in the cryptocurrency market in South Korea, owning approximately 75.7 percent of the volume. It is also one of the five largest bitcoin exchanges in the word, trading over 13,000 bitcoins worth of cryptocurrency trading volume which make up around 10 percent of the global market.

Initially, Bithumb is offering victims up to 100,000 won, or about $87. Anyone who suffered additional losses will receive more compensation when the total damages have been calculated. It is estimated that Bithumb will pay out as much as 3 billion won in total, or around $2.6 million. The South Korean government is investigating, with a number of agencies participating.

While these kinds of attacks can be discouraging and seem completely out of our control, there are still steps we can take to keep ourselves safe or at least a little safer. In the case of the Bithumb attack, it was old-school social engineering that was used to break into customer accounts, reinforcing the need to be paranoid when deciding when to give out personal information over the phone. The bottom line remains the same: Never give up your secrets unless you are absolutely certain who you are talking to, and never give anyone your password or other credentials.

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How to Avoid Being Scammed by a Cryptocurrency ICO – The Merkle

With cryptocurrency ICOs taking center stage lately, there will be more attempts to scam people as well. It can be difficult to protect oneself against thesescams, butsome basic precautions will keep most people safe. This new digital craze will need to be regulatedsomehow, as the amount of scamscan get out of hand pretty quickly. Below are some basic tips to avoid getting scammed by a cryptocurrency ICO.

The first step investors always need to take is conducting due diligence on a project. Randomly investing in cryptocurrency ICOs can pay off in the long run, but it also greatly increases ones chances of investing in a bogus project. Any ICO that does not have a detailed whitepaper should be avoided, as that is a basic requirement for any serious project. If the company or project cannot convince you of its use cases, you should not give them your money.

Any project that does not want to make the names of its team members public should also raise red flags. If the names and identities are made public, do some research on the people involved in the project. Do not be fooled by big names working as an adviser for a project either. These roles often lack real influence over the direction and execution of projects. Fancy names mean nothing these days, as a lot of information found on the internet is either doctored or utterly fake.

On multiple occasions, we see people spreading fake Ethereum wallet addresses to participate in a specific cryptocurrency ICO. This mostly occurs on Telegram, butSlack can suffer from the same problem. Never trust an Ethereum wallet address given to you by strangers on the internet. Do not ask for these addresses either, as you are only asking to be scammed by doing so. Only use the information provided by the team itself and the address shown on the legitimate ICO website.

Perhaps the biggest threat to cryptocurrency ICOs and potential investors comes in the form of phishing sites. More often than not, we see clone websites for upcoming ICOs appear on the internet. This can affect both CIO and pre-ICO campaigns, which makes it very difficult for novice users to determine which site is legitimate and which one is not. The best course of action is to links spread on Telegram or Slack, other than the ones provided by the moderators and team members.

Since phishing sites look exactly like the real ICO site, investors would almost need to know the official site before it launches. That is very hard to achieve, as most ICO projects want to keep pre-ICO and ICO links undisclosed until the campaign starts. Keeping tabs on projects through platforms such as Tokenmarket will guarantee users will always find the correct URL for a cryptocurrency ICO. It is by far one of the most trusted ICO websites out there.

Even though TokenMarket does a good job to keep track of cryptocurrency ICOs, we will ultimately need a decentralized registry for these types of projects. Adecentralized registry can provide whitelist services to cull the phishing sites from the real platforms. Ensuring people provide the correct information in the first place can be a challenge, though. For some reason, virtually all cryptocurrency ICOs rely on centralized technology, which is problematic to any such efforts.

If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter @themerklenews and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and technology news.

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Beat the Flash Boys of Cryptocurrency Trading with AICoin – Finance Magnates

Gavin Smith is the CEO of First Global Credit, a London-based cryptocurrency capital markets company, who is behind an upcoming ICO for AICoin. He sat down today to talk with Finance Magnates about the idea behind the offering, the value it will deliver to investors, algo trading and how blockchain technology allows for new forms of cooperative organization.

Learn how to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum safely with our simple guide!

The interview was broadcast live and a video recording is available here:

In contrast to the recent wave of ICOs, Gavin explains that AICOIN is a fully functioning investment service (not an idea in development) that leverages blockchain technology to deliver revenue from two different but complementary profit streams.

The coin uses the power of artificial intelligence to generate ongoing profit. These profits are then used to finance investment in early stage companies focused on public blockchain or AI technology. The quarterly selection of start-up companies will use the collective knowledge and experience of all token holders who vote on which companies will receive investment.

Since AICOIN is built on the Ethereum blockchain, the function of the smart contract is to provide transparency to and supervisory control of the voting process.

Gavin has worked in the European financial service industry for over twenty years. His most recent role prior to founding First Global was designing the global risk strategy for one of the worlds largest physical commodity traders. He has the rare set of skills needed to navigate First Global Credit through the volatility of the Bitcoin market..

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The Hive Project Debuts New Cryptocurrency-Based Invoice Financing Platform – Crowdfund Insider

The Hive Project announced last week the launch of its cryptocurrency-based invoice financing platform. This news comes just days before the company launched its ICO. The company boasts itself as the first cryptocurrency invoice financing platform. It notably provides new financial liquidity to small businesses by leveraging blockchain technology and giving them a range of cryptocurrency-based financing options.

Hive (HVE) uses blockchain (distributed ledger) technology to give every issued invoice a unique fingerprint. This enables businesses to automate the invoicing process and make it available to the general public. We create a central data room for all invoices, with a record kept of the issuer, owner and payer. Invoices can therefore be offered to the market for trading. This will rapidly increase the liquidity available to small businesses and create a central database of invoices available for scoring and auditing. In addition to bridging the liquidity gap for small businesses, the technology provided by Hive will help credit checks to be made on companies and facilitate rapid and real-time auditing.

Speaking about The Hive Projects goals,Jure Soklic, CEO and co-founder, reportedly stated:

We want to help small businesses solve their liquidity issues by leveraging blockchain technology to provide financing options previously only available to large companies. Our platform will dramatically streamline invoice issuance and settlement processes, optimizing small and medium-enterprises ability to access liquidity for day-to-day operations and to finance expansion.

Richard Titus, Advisor to Hive Project, added:

The Hive Project helps small businesses automate invoicing and payments, delivering the benefits of blockchain innovation to commercial entities previously deprived of ready access to finances, Hive Projects end state, a marketplace with advanced trading analytics for peer-to-peer lending, will rapidly increase the liquidity available to small businesses and expand todays often mercenary ecosystem of factoring and lending.

The Hive Project is currently seeking to secure initial capital of BTC 2,000 through its crowd sale, which is scheduled to run for the next six weeks.

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Quantum Computers Compete for "Supremacy" – Scientific American

Scientists have long dreamed of developing quantum computers, machines that rely on arcane laws of physics to perform tasks far beyond the capability of todays strongest supercomputers. In theory such a machine could create mathematical models too complex for standard computers, vastly extending the range and accuracy of weather forecasts and financial market predictions, among other things. They could simulate physical processes such as photosynthesis, opening new frontiers in green energy. Quantum computing could also jolt artificial intelligence to a vastly higher level of sophistication: If IBMs Watson can already win at Jeopardy! and make some medical diagnoses, imagine what an enormously smarter version could do.

But to realize those visions, scientists first have to figure out how to actually build a quantum computer that can perform more than the simplest operations. They are now getting closer than ever, with IBM in May announcing its most complex quantum system so far and Google saying it is on track this year to unveil a processor with so-called quantum supremacycapabilities no conventional computer can match.

Small systems exist, but the next steps in the race to make them bigger will have to determine whether quantum computers can deliver on their potential. Scientists and industry players have focused largely on one of two approaches. One cools loops of wire to near 273.15 degrees Celsius, or absolute zero, turning them into superconductors where current flows with virtually no resistance. The other relies on trapped ionscharged atoms of the rare earth element ytterbium held in place in a vacuum chamber by laser beams and manipulated by other lasers. The oscillating charges (in both the wires and the trapped ions) function as quantum bits, or qubits, which can be harnessed to carry out the computers operations.

The trick to either approach is figuring out how to get from already demonstrated systemscontaining just a few qubitsto ones that can handle the hundreds or thousands required for the kind of heavy lifting that quantum technology seems to promise. Last year IBM made a five-qubit quantum processor available to developers, researchers and programmers for experimentation via its cloud portal. The company has made significant progress since then, revealing in May that it has upgraded its cloud-based quantum computer to a 16-qubit processorand created a more tightly engineered 17-qubit processor that could be the basis for commercial systems. Both are based on the wire-loop superconducting circuits, as is Googles 20-qubit processor, which the company announced at a conference in Munich, Germany, on June 22. Alan Ho, an engineer in Googles Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, told the conference his company expects to achieve quantum supremacy with a 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.

Those numbers may not seem impressive. But a qubit is much more powerful than the kind of bit that serves as the smallest unit of data in a conventional computer. Those bits are based on the flow of electrical current, and make up the digital language in which all computing functions: Off means 0 and on means 1, and those two states encode all of the computers operations. Qubits, however, are not based on yes/no electrical switchesbut rather on a particles quantum properties, such as the direction in which an electron spins. And in the quantum world a particle can simultaneously exist in a variety of states more complex than simply on/offa phenomenon known as superposition. You can have heads, you can have tails, but you can also have any weighted superposition. You can have 70-30 heads-tails, says Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and founder of IonQ, a start-up working on building a quantum computer with trapped ions.

The more-than-binary ability to occupy multiple states at once allows qubits to perform many calculations simultaneously, vastly magnifying their computing power. That power grows exponentially with the number of qubits. So at somewhere around 49 or 50 qubits, quantum computers reach the equivalent of about 10 quadrillion bits and become capable of calculations no classical computer could ever match, says John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology. Whether they will be doing useful things is a different question, he says.

Both superconducting circuits and trapped ions have a good shot at hitting that fiftyish-qubit threshold, says Jerry Chow, manager of experimental quantum computing at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Conventional thinking would suggest that more qubits means more powerbut Chow notes its not just about the number of qubits. He is more focused on the number and quality of calculations the machine can perform, a metric he calls quantum volume. That includes additional factors such as how fast the qubits can perform the calculations and how well they avoid or correct for errors that can creep in. Some of those factors can work against one another; adding more qubits, for instance, can increase the rate of errors as information passes down the line from one qubit to another. As a community we should all be focusingno matter whether were working on superconducting qubits or trapped ions or whateveron pushing this quantum volume higher and higher so we can really make more and more powerful quantum processors and do things that we never thought of, Chow says.

Monroe recently compared his five-qubit trapped ion system with IBMs five-qubit processor by running the same simple algorithms on both, and found the performance comparable. The biggest difference, he says, is that the trapped ions are all connected to one another via electromagnetic forces: Wiggle one ion in a string of 30 and every other ion reacts, making it easy to quickly and accurately pass information among them. In the wire-loop superconductor circuit only some qubits are connected, which makes passing information a slower process that can introduce errors.

One advantage of superconducting circuits is that they are easy to build using the same processes that make computer chips. They perform a computers basic logic gate operationsthat is, adding, subtracting or otherwise manipulating the bitsin billionths of a second. On the other hand, qubits in this type of system hold their quantum state for only millisecondsthousandths of a secondso any operation must be completed in that time.

Trapped ions, by contrast, retain their quantum states for many secondssometimes even minutes or hours. But the logic gates in such a system run about 1,000 times slower than in superconductor-based quantum computing. That speed reduction probably does not matter in simple operations with just a few qubits, Monroe says. But it could become a problem for getting an answer in a reasonable amount of time as the number of qubits increases. For superconducting qubits, rising numbers may mean a struggle to connect them together.

And increasing the number of qubits, no matter what technology they are used with, makes it harder to connect and manipulate thembecause that must be done while keeping them isolated from the rest of the world so they will maintain their quantum states. The more atoms or electrons are grouped together in large numbers, the more the rules of classical physics take overand the less significant the quantum properties of the individual atoms become to how the whole system behaves. When you make a quantum system big, it becomes less quantum, Monroe says.

Chow thinks quantum computers will become powerful enough to do at least something beyond the capability of classical computerspossibly a simulation in quantum chemistrywithin about five years. Monroe says it is reasonable to expect systems containing a few thousand qubits in a decade or so. To some extent, Monroe says, researchers will not know what they will be able to do with such systems until they figure out how to build them.

Preskill, who is 64, says he thinks he will live long enough to see quantum computers have an impact on society in the way the internet and smartphones havealthough he cannot predict exactly what that impact will be. These quantum systems kind of speak a language that digital systems dont speak, he says. We know from history that we just dont have the imagination to anticipate where new information technologies can carry us.

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Microsoft Teams updated on iOS and Android with new cloud … – OnMSFT (blog)

Two weeks ago, Microsofts Teams enterprise collaboration app was updated with support for more cloud storage services including Dropbox, Google Drive and Box. A similar update is now available on iOS and Android devices, and the two mobile apps now allow users to share files in both channels and private chats.

The separate changelogs also mention the addition of new languages such as Norwegian and Thai, and Android users should now be able to reply to messages from their notification screen. Here is the full changelog for the Android version 1.0.0.2017062601, which was released last week:

The changelog for the iOS version 1.0.15 is nearly identical, with the additional mention of bug fixes and performance improvements:

If the Teams Android app is currently compatible with Android 4.4 and up, the iOS app now requires iOS 10.0 or later, which is quite unusual for Microsofts iOS apps. As for the Teams Windows 10 Mobile app, its still lagging behind the two other mobile platforms for now (it still doesnt support voice and video calls as of today), but Microsoft is still updating it at a regular pace.

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Storage the favourite use case for public cloud customers – ComputerWeekly.com

Storage and backup are the most common use cases for the public cloud and Microsoft Azure is Europes favourite cloud platform.

Those are the findings of a survey by backup product and service supplier Barracuda.

Nearly four out of five (77%) respondents to a survey of 550 European IT decision-makers (150 in the UK) cited storage as their key cloud workload, with 57% citing backup and recovery.

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Behind that came application hosting (54%), data analytics (51%), customer relationship management (CRM) (46%), application testing and development (38%), and desktop virtualisation (33%).

Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure was found to be the most commonly used cloud platform (57%), with Amazon Web Services (46%), Google Cloud (38%) and IBM Bluemix (26%) behind it.

In the UK, Azure was more popular than elsewhere in Europe, with 67% of respondents more likely to use it.

On average, respondents said their organisation uses two public cloud service providers, with a higher figure in Germany (three). Of those that use more than one, the most likely reasons for doing so are that different providers have different strengths (55%) and that it increases security (44%).

On average, respondents organisations have 34.5% of their infrastructure in the public cloud, with this set to increase to 62.5% in the next five years. The UK average is lower, with 29% of infrastructure in the public cloud. The European cloud hotspot is Belgium/Netherlands with 40.5% of infrastructure hosted in the cloud.

Respondents reported that 20% of their organisations annual IT budget is spent on public cloud, on average, with this being higher (25%) among those in Belgium/Netherlands.

Trust in the cloud has increased with progress towards greater use, but reservations still exist.

When it comes to trust, 58% said they trust in the public cloud more than they did five years ago, and that is Europe-wide. The UK fell below that average with 52% saying they trust more in the public cloud now than five years ago.

Only about two in five (43%) of those surveyed felt totally confident that their organisations move to the public cloud is secure, with this being lowest (31%) for respondents in the UK.

About three in five (57%) respondents said that their organisation has added extra security measures to their public cloud to protect it during access. That figure is only 43% for the UK, however.

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Cloud computing security: This is where you’ll be spending the money – ZDNet

kynny, Getty Images/iStockphoto

As businesses get more serious about using cloud computing they're also getting more concerned about security.

This may come as something of a surprise to some who were sold cloud computing as being inherently more secure than traditional in-house IT infrastructure, but it also reflects the differing levels of security required by organisations.

"For immature organizations the native cloud service provider security almost always improves security. For mature and very mature organizations, native cloud security controls may be insufficient, this is why companies prefer to use extra cloud security layers and solutions to improve their security coverage of cloud workloads," said Andras Cser, principal analyst at tech research company Forrester.

This demand is leading to growth in cloud security tools, which monitor data moving to and from the cloud and between cloud platforms. For example, tools that aim to identify fraudulent use of data in the cloud, unauthorised downloads, and malware in the cloud.

According to Forrester, the market for cloud security solutions grew 28 percent every year up to 2021, from $1bn in 2016 to $3.5bn in 2021, although it will remain small compared to the total public cloud market, which will hit $236bn by 2020.

Businesses tend to use a number of different platforms -- public, private, and hybrid cloud -- and this means that monitoring data, detecting anomalies, and spotting bad behaviour across different services can be hard.

"Traditional perimeter-based security tools do little to protect cloud workloads, and do-it-yourself internal solutions can be costly to develop and consume valuable in-house it resources. We expect most companies to look to commercial off-the-shelf solutions for their cloud security needs," said Forrester.

Using third party tools, rather than relying on the cloud vendors own security, can give companies an additional layer of security. By using an additional layer of encryption, for example, companies can ensure that even if the cloud provider gets hacked their data should remain secure.

But adding that additional layer of security over the top of cloud computing does have an impact, both on price and performance.

Cser said these additional steps will effectively reduce the return on investment of the cloud by five to 10 percent, while performance of systems also diminishes by five to 15 percent, depending on the processing requirements. "Think of it as a performance tax," he said.

Forrester's Cloud Security Solutions Forecast said growth areas for cloud security include:

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Four in five companies not getting most out of cloud investments, research warns – Cloud Tech

Only one in five organisations are getting the most out of their cloud investments with 96% saying it could do with a makeover, according to new survey results from Fugue.

The research, which garnered the responses of more than 300 IT operations professionals, found the majority of those polled said compliance and security concerns, unexpected downtime, and a plethora of cloud management tools available today, means their investments are not hitting the right mark.

When asked why the cloud landscape needed a makeover, 33% said their experience needed to be simplified and easier to use, compared with 29% who cited security, with more ease controlling costs (13%) and easier to control generally (10%) also cited.

More than a third (36%) of respondents said the C-suite fails to understand its complexity, while a quarter (26%) said IT leadership struggles with it and one in five (20%) said the same for developers. This complexity is borne out in the number of disparate tools used by organisations; just under a third (31%) say they are using between six and 10 tools, compared with 38% using three to five, 16% for 11-15, and 7% who are using more than 15.

Naturally, these results bode well for Fugue, a company based in Maryland, as well as Washington DC and Silicon Valley, whose modus operandi is around cloud automation and simplifying lifecycle management of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure service stack.

The promises of the cloud are tremendous, but they are hard-won, said Josh Stella, CEO and co-founder of Fugue in a statement. You hear youll get rid of data centres, save money and move faster; clouds essentially an infinite resource. But what happens is that IT departments lose control of it they cant keep track of everything thats running, and there are security and compliance complications.

If youre Netflix, you have enough money to throw at the problem, but most companies trying to manage the cloud end up in a DIY headache of patch-ups and tools that were born in the data centre and adapted for use in the cloud, Stella added.

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